What is it about?
Life benefits from a livable temperature, accessible water, and fertile ground. Facing extreme weather, flood, drought, and famine, many people seek effective methods to care for family, community, and home now and toward the future. Financially just relations are required in Muslim ethics, therefore current people may reflect on charitable generosity toward earth’s life support systems to prevent extractive borrowing from the future.
Featured Image
Photo by David Vives on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Excessively greedy financial practices are nothing new, and in centuries past through today, usury, or extractive interest on loans, is prohibited by religious laws. Nearly all religions praise charitable generosity and condemn harming actions, therefore, ethical boundaries serve to reduce or eliminate harm to others, while focusing on serving beneficially in community. Preventing financial harm continues to be important in global Islamic, or halal, finance. Muslim environmental writers define eco-halal practices, supporting stewardship or trusteeship of global and local resources. As planetary heating intensifies extreme weather events, including excess heat projected in the region for Muslim pilgrimage, current people appear not only to borrow unjustly from future resources to sustain a living world, but to render crucial religious practices hazardous for future believers. When religious extremism and resource conflicts intensify in a warming climate, planetary heating is more than a problem of higher temperatures in degrees Celsius. Nevertheless, multi-continent, social scientific evidence affirms that generous behaviors—central to Muslim financial ethics, if applied to global eco-halal finance—enable a shift from wasteful, extractive practices to just, balanced practices, fostering ethics among people now and in the future.
Perspectives
To care for children, family, community, and home, for much of history, people watched the skies, tended land, and prayed, hoping for a better tomorrow. Today, facing extreme weather, flood, drought, and famine, many people find data-informed ways to watch the skies and tend the land, plus effective methods to put prayer into action to care for family now and into the future. Muslim halal finance focuses on pious principles, avoiding extractive financial practices, such as predatory lending, or usury. Yet, inheritors of our world may bear unjust financial burdens connected to climate- and land-harming practices today. For example, ongoing extraction and pollution directly link to hazards for Mecca pilgrims fulfilling lifelong religious goals. Therefore, eco-halal ethics may integrate Muslim piety into protective actions in generous and meaningful charity, reflected in a proverb, which reads, “The one who has food is debtor to the one who has none.” Wholesome finance for flourishing land and healthy skies may yield pathways to avoid destructive extraction and hazardous pollution. While God’s unity connects over 1.8 billion participants in Islam, Muslim eco-halal climate ethics can connect charitable acts with future caretakers of divine “property,” our irreplaceable local home regions connected in planetary life systems.
Sarah Robinson
Dominican University of California
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Borrowing against the Future: Is Ecological Usury Changing the Climate?, October 2024, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004681033_007.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
